The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (34 page)

Also that afternoon, Weiskopf’s good friend Bert Yancey pulled him aside. Yancey was infatuated with trying to win the Masters himself, going so far as to construct scale models of the holes at his house. He had noticed that Weiskopf seemed to be out of his normal putting rhythm and wanted him to try a metronome he’d acquired. “So he set it up to that sequence. I counted ‘one-two,’ and as soon as my eyes came back to the ball I said, ‘three,’ and took the club back. It just freed me up,” says Weiskopf.

New putter in hand, he went right out and won that week, his first of five wins in eight starts over the next two-and-a-half months. He didn’t shoot a round over par in his next three events, finishing 2nd in Atlanta and winning in Charlotte and Philadelphia.

After coming in 3rd in the U.S. Open at Oakmont and tied for 5th at the American Golf Classic, he traveled to July’s British Open at Troon in Scotland as the hottest player in the game. Every day there, he would see and hear the trains as they ran by the golf course, reminding him of his father. After opening with 68–67, Weiskopf was paired in the final two rounds with Johnny Miller, the U.S. Open champion from the month prior. All Miller saw was him making putt after putt with that Tommy Armour. By Miller’s count, Weiskopf one-putted twenty-one of the last thirty-six holes. “His putting just wore me out,” says Miller. Weiskopf won wire–to-wire for his first major championship title.

Two weeks later, he captured the Canadian Open and then the unofficial World Series of Golf against the year’s other three major champions: Nicklaus, Miller, and Tommy Aaron. His year concluded overseas with a win in the South African PGA in December. His line on the PGA Tour: five wins, twelve top-three finishes, and third on the money list with $245,156. Moreover, in fifteen total starts around the world from mid-May until the end of the year, Weiskopf’s worst finish was 6th at the PGA Championship.

“I dedicated that year in ’73 to my father,” says Weiskopf. “I talked to him all the time. When things got tough on the golf course, I told him I’m going to do it, watch this. I had this inner-conversation all the time. It’s too bad he couldn’t see me win my only major.”

Even with a career year, Weiskopf still finished behind Nicklaus on the money list that season. He won seven times and earned PGA Player of the Year honors. Weiskopf was selected Player of the Year by the Golf Writers’ Association of American and
Golf Magazine
. “I think Tom in ’72–’73 was better than Jack tee-to-green,” says Sneed.
“I think he had come into a groove in his swing. The shots that he hit were just marvelous.”

With his Army Reserve duties up at the end of 1973, Weiskopf looked to be on his way to super stardom. But 1974 didn’t lead down that path.

“I didn’t like the exposure that went with the success that I had,” he says. “I didn’t like the lack of privacy.” Having to put up with strangers coming up to him and telling him about seeing him play wasn’t his cup of tea. “I admire Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and all the guys who could handle that. I did not like that at all,” says Weiskopf.

Even his now rosy portrayal in the media rankled him. “I became Tom Terrific, and previous to that I was Terrible Tom,” he says. “I was still the same guy.

“The press can label anybody and create their cast of characters and their storylines. Now everybody thinks I’m the greatest guy in the world. I haven’t changed. Maybe I lived up to everybody’s expectations. And finally maybe they’re happier than I am. I didn’t like that.”

On top of the extra attention, Weiskopf started the year with an injury. Tendinitis in his left thumb hindered his play in the first three months of 1974. Other than some stomach problems that Weiskopf said were the result of “working himself up too much,” this was the first golf injury he’d ever had. “It really, really hurt,” says Weiskopf. “I should’ve taken off.”

“It was very frustrating because ’73 was such a great year,” he says. He tried medications and anti-inflammatories, everything but a shot. His doctor told him to take a month off and he’d be fine, but Weiskopf says he couldn’t put down the clubs, “Especially when you pick up the newspaper and see that guy did that, he won that. I need to get out there.”

Because of the injury, he didn’t practice as much and began compromising movements in his swing to ease the pain. He started
playing golf with his right side only, a bad fault he had to fix once healthy. “He suffered a little bit when he had that thumb,” says Sneed. “You can cut off any finger of my golf grip except for my left thumb. That’s the most important digit on a (right-handed) golfer’s hand. When you have pain there, it’s hard to hit a shot with a lot of confidence and hit the ball hard.”

With his thumb still bothering him, he held a five-shot lead going into the final round of the Western Open. Several uncharacteristically wayward shots down the stretch let Tom Watson capture his maiden PGA Tour win.

Weiskopf fell to thirteenth on the money list with three runner-up finishes in 1974. He failed to record a win. It wasn’t a bad season by average Tour standards; however, by the standards the media and Weiskopf had set for himself, it was unacceptable.

AT THE START
of 1975, Weiskopf stood at another crossroad in his career, made more challenging by the death of Bob Kepler early that year. The man who was like a second father to Weiskopf and his defacto swing coach had retired from Ohio State in 1965 and become head professional at Hound Ears Club in the mountains of North Carolina. “He knew my game so well. I could call him up on the telephone, and he’d always ask, ‘What’s the ball doing’,” says Weiskopf. “I’d explain what I thought my problems were. ‘Well why don’t you try this, call me back tomorrow.’ I’d go work on it, and 90 percent of the time he was right on the money.”

Again as with the passing of his father two years earlier, it galvanized Weiskopf. “He believed in me so much,” says Weiskopf. “He spent so much time with me. And he was such a positive guy.”

Weiskopf did some soul searching, and by late-February he had rediscovered his game. He finished 4th in Los Angeles and tied for 7th at Inverrary, even though he bogeyed the final two holes. At Hilton Head, a 65 in the second round put him in contention, but his
nemesis Nicklaus still defeated him. Then in Greensboro the very next week, he won for the first time on Tour in twenty months.

Now, Weiskopf was the 54-hole leader for the first time in the Masters. He was just eighteen holes from the greatest triumph in his life.

Saturday night, Weiskopf rested with the weight of all this on him.

Finally, maybe he could do it for his dad, do it for Kep. And if he could win, maybe he could finally see his own shadow—not just that of Nicklaus’s.

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SUNDAY, APRIL 13

B
efore Saturday ended in Augusta, Sunday had already begun in Welwyn Garden City, England, a small town just north of London. Five hours ahead and 4,000 miles away, anticipation ate away at a seventeen-year-old boy, just as it had the previous three second-Sundays in April. The final round of the Masters wouldn’t be shown by the British Broadcasting Corporation until late that evening on a slight tape delay. He would just have to spend the day playing golf and waiting.

Nick Faldo loved sports. That suited his mother Joyce—anything as long as he wasn’t sitting in front of the television. Her son had tried them all: swimming, track and field, tennis, skiing, soccer, rugby, cricket, etc. “A sportsman looking for a sport,” he says. But in the first thirteen years of his life, golf hadn’t been given a single thought until he watched television. Seeing the 1971 Masters on his parents’ new color set changed his life. “It was the trees and these fairways ... and the colorful golfers,” says Faldo, who was one of many boys (and girls) in the United Kingdom whose interest in golf was ignited by watching the Masters since the first overseas broadcast of the tournament by the BBC in 1967. Faldo had already decided that he
wanted an outdoor job and to be his own boss, which led to his two top career choices at the time: landscape gardening and the forestry commission. This beautiful place in Georgia was somewhere he’d love to work. “It was almost the surroundings of golf rather than the actual golf,” he admits of his attraction. One didn’t have to be a golfer or a fan of golf to be charmed by Augusta National. He wanted to try the game.

The very next day, his ever-supportive parents, who knew nothing about golf either, signed up their only child for a half-dozen lessons and later bought him a half-set of clubs. From there, his obsession with the game grew. In July 1973, just a week before his son’s sixteenth birthday, George Faldo took him to see his very first professional tournament—the British Open at Troon. Father and son loaded up their camping gear and hopped in the family’s white VW Beetle for the 400-mile drive north to Scotland. They would camp out at night and absorb the professional game during the day.

At the course each morning, George picked a spot and instructed his son to meet him back there at 5:00 p.m. Until that time, Faldo had complete run of the links. Kept warm in the chilly weather by wearing his pajamas under his clothes, Faldo scurried to take everything in. He would lie down beside the tee boxes to peak between legs, then hustle down the fairway to watch second shots before moving on to the green. Nicklaus, Palmer, Player, Trevino, the British idol Tony Jacklin—he saw them all at Troon. The practice range became his favorite stop, where he would let the rhythm of their swings and the big, colorful golf bags mesmerize him. But as much as anything or anyone, two players took hold of Faldo’s fancy—Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller.

Faldo was already over six feet in height, and it was natural that he gravitated toward two of the taller players on Tour. But the attraction was deeper than that. “Weiskopf came down the range one evening talking with Jack and was hitting balls in his street shoes,” he says. “I thought, ‘wow.’ That was showing off his tempo.” Faldo
followed him. “Weiskopf hit a 1-iron, and I’d never seen such a divot. It was as thin as your finger.” Faldo was also enamored with the sound of his shots at impact. Even four decades later, he vividly remembers standing on the 7th tee, witnessing Weiskopf crack a 1-iron that kept pace with the driver of playing competitor Peter Oosterhuis.

The smoothness of Miller’s swing and flight of his shots—hardly ever off-line—stuck with Faldo as well. “I remember seeing Johnny coming down those first few holes and watching the balls dance when they hit the greens,” he says. “As a youngster, I haven’t come close to getting backspin on a ball.” Weiskopf and Miller were paired together in the final group for the final two rounds, and Faldo followed them as much as possible until he and his father had to make the journey back down south for work before the end of the last day.

At home, he returned to his local club and began playing imaginary games—his favorite a best-ball with two of the game’s best taking on himself. The team of Weiskopf and Miller versus Faldo was a popular match. With Tom Weiskopf, Faldo would try to copy his meticulous address of the ball, his steady head, his tempo, his straight left arm, and his divots from those long irons. With Johnny Miller, he would mimic his walk into the ball, his milking of the grip, his leg action, and his high, ever-so-slight fade with the irons. As for his own game, Faldo would let all of the varying idiosyncrasies he saw at Troon seep into his swing—“accidental self-taught visualization” he would call it years later.

By April 1975, Faldo had quit school and crafted himself into one of England’s leading amateurs. Golf was going to be his living. “I used to sit on the windowsill of my bedroom, look at the stars and dream this whole thing, just painting the pictures of the future,” he said. On this night, the telly would frame the colors and hues of Augusta and reveal what lay ahead for those fortunate enough to realize their aspirations. And on this night, he would find out who tomorrow’s competition would be. Weiskopf? Miller? Nicklaus?

“
ALL RIGHT
, let ’em go,” hollered a security guard by Gate 3 after checking his watch one final time. It was 8:00 a.m. Time to open the gates. Cars had begun pulling into the club’s main Number 1 parking lot at the corner of Washington Road and Berckmans Road long before sunrise at 7:01 a.m. This day would be the warmest of the competition, with afternoon highs nearing 70 degrees and less breezy, what wind there was now coming from the south. But as glorious early spring days can go in the South, the start was chilly with morning temperatures slow to warm off a near-freezing low.

A ticket to the Masters had never been hotter than on this day. Scalpers worked in the shadows right across Washington Road, out of sight but not out of mind. The club began producing a plastic ticket with a raised logo in 1966 to prevent counterfeiting. These season badges were numbered with a reminder on the back: “Seller reserves right at any time to take up this badge and cancel all privileges connected therewith.” This year’s ticket was red and mustard yellow, making the sporting event look more like a Washington Redskins home game. The four-day tickets, which the club sold for $30, had reportedly gone for as much as $1,000 a piece earlier in the week.

Even some without a ticket or the means to participate in the black market weren’t dissuaded from trying their luck with the Pinkerton guards. They claimed to be press or PGA members. They lined up at Will Call spouting off names without any proof of identification. They approached with a bare safety pin attached to their clothing claiming their ticket had fallen off. Already this year a man who professed to be the Prime Minister of India had sauntered up to the gate. He wasn’t. And the occasional bribe wasn’t uncommon—both of the monetary and non-monetary variety.